Chapter Two
The longer I was with CowBelle, the more I believed in things. Things like aliens and conspiracy theories and the afterlife and evolution and love. You know, the unprovable things. The things that science could evaluate and guess about but never find completely undeniable proof to. There was just so much possibility and so little impossibility with CowBelle. The world was there, it was all full of questions and maybes. She showed me that there was just too much space for everything to be revolving around our one lonely little planet in the far off reaching corners of a galaxy that was just one in a million galaxies in the universe. There had to be more to life, and she was so hungry for it, so enthusiastic, it was wildly contagious.
Six months into our relationship was when Project Whitenoise first got it's first break through. Whitenoise was the side project that Belle had been working on that kept her from being a "practicing" astronomer. The project was a plan that she had to further mankind's attempts at contacting extraterrestrial life. The big break was a thick envelope mailed to her house from SETI - the organization in charge of the search for extra-terrestrials - asking her to write a formal proposal and submit it to them for presentation to some donors that were interested in funding a project similar to what she had written to them about.
"We've done stuff like Whitenoise before," Belle was explaining in a speedy, hyper-from-excitement voice the morning she received the envelope. We were in her kitchen, I was frying bacon that I'd dug out of her fridge and she was sitting at the table wearing thick rimmed glasses shuffling through a mess of papers and notes scribbled on napkins, trying to collect what she needed for the formal proposal. She was wearing a bathrobe with stars all over it, which I knew for a fact had nothing under it. "The other projects were just different in that they weren't as large or as continuous. Continuity is the key. I need to stress continuity..." she scribbled a note onto a paper towel that I'd laid on the table beside her for her toast.
I ripped a new paper towel off the roll. "What exactly is Whitenoise?" I asked.
"Well... okay. So... Radio Transmission. It's like this..." CowBelle paused and lowered her glasses down her nose, to look over the rims at me. "Radio waves are really scarce in space so to encounter them there is so rare that any kind of a pattern in radio waves, we assume, would be intercepted and interpreted as a transmission of some sort... so when we try to send messages to extra-terrestrial life - and I don't mean like little green men, you know that right?"
I nodded.
"So when we're trying to send messages we send out radio waves so that they'll be hopefully intercepted. We've sent messages out - digital time capsules, basically, describing human nature, like depictions of our DNA strands and alphanumeric figures, et cetera - but they're just one-shot transmissions. We send them out into space in the direction of some arbitrary star and hope that someone will be cruising through and intercept the transmissions before they reach their destination sometime in the future. Like the soonest one to reach its destination will be in 2036."
I whistled low, "Talk about long distance."
"Several thousand light years."
I picked up a piece of bacon from the pan and munched on it. "So how is Whitenoise different?"
"Well," she said, "Whitenoise is different because where those are one-shot capsules of transmissions, Whitenoise in effect creates a continuous rhythm of a message. It just sends and sends and sends until someone responds. 'Cos like... the messages we've sent out are great and stuff but the odds of someone just happening to fly by in time to intercept the message as it goes past isn't very likely. A million and two opportunities could be missed on it's way because of simple lack of collision, you know? Where as if we continuously stream something there's a much higher collision possibility rate. Does that make sense?"
I nodded.
"So my idea is that we broadcast sound, something repetitive, like a song maybe, into deep space and just let it run until someone answers. It doesn't matter what the sound is, if they're searching for us as hard as we're searching for them they'll investigate and we can share human history with them then. We're just looking for a response."
"It sounds brilliant to me," I said.
CowBelle smiled, "You think everything is brilliant."
"Not everything. Just everything you say," I corrected.
She laughed. "Well hopefully SETI agrees with you and my proposal gets some funding."
And they did.
She got the proposal sent out to them within a month and they accepted it, loved it, and launched it into the next phase of trying to garner some funding to make it a possibility, as well as locate radio telescopes that would be willing to allow CowBelle access to their sites to monitor the transmission signals freely whenever she wanted. Most places were hesitant to tie up their satellites and telescopes in such a way, though, because many were hesitant to accept any kind of responsibility for such an incredibly expensive project that wasn't guaranteed to garner any results.
We moved in together a year later, and SETI was still working on getting the proposal funded.
In September of 2010, CowBelle received the news that the Vanderbilt-Dyer Observatory in Nashville was willing to house her project if she could come up with the funding for it, and SETI announced that they'd been given a partial grant from a donor of considerable means and only needed a couple hundred grand to build a radio satellite at the Dyer. I decided to invest in the project and sold the house in Los Angeles to fund the satellite and buy a small house for Belle and I to move to that was closer to the Observatory.
They built the satellite radio transmitter on the property of the majestic old building in Brentwood, Tennessee - just sound of Nashville - where famous astronomers from over many years of study had visited. Belle's eyes were wide with amazement as we walked around the small observatory and she stared into cases of meteorites and stared up at a one-fifth scale dummy of the Hubble telescope on hung on the ceiling of the library there.
It was the night of our third anniversary that we were gathered on the roof top by the satellite with Belle's research assistant, Fabritz, awaiting the moment that transmission would begin. We were holding cups of hot apple cider spiked with rum, standing on the roof as Fabritz checked and rechecked all the wires for the transmission hardware, making sure everything was ready to go for our 8:30 PM go time.
CowBelle looked up at me, jittery with excitement. "Are you excited?" she asked.
"Immensely," I replied. The week before, Belle had come to me and requested for me to get the fellas together for the five of us to sign a contract allowing her to use a recording of I Want It That Way for the transmission. We'd agreed of course. And it blew my mind as we stood there on the roof top that my voice was soon going to be traveling light years away from us, further than any human voice had ever traveled before in the entire history of mankind. It was a huge honor. And to think that when/if the transmission did reach alien ears for the first time, I would be one of the first five human voices they would ever hear.
Fabritz looked up from the hardware, "Eight twenty-five," he said. "Everything looks solid."
"Awesome." Belle grinned. She rubbed her hands together eagerly - probably also to keep warm as the autumn air was chilling off the nights by the end of October in Nashville. She danced to the control panel and started playing with switches and gears started grinding and a computer hummed to life. The go-ahead was given, it was time for Project Whitenoise to commence. She took a deep breath, "Okay," she said, "We'll know that the transmission is working when the Hubble Telescope does it's fly-by at 8:35, and the transmission should momentarily be redirected back at us. We'll hear the transmission for approximately twenty-seven seconds before the telescope passes by completely and the transmission will be on its way to deep space."
We all gathered eagerly around the computer.
"To connection," CowBelle said, holding up her rum cider glass.
"To communication," Fabritz agreed.
"To continuity," I added, grinning.
Belle hit the begin transmission button and the computer made a whirring sound, but other than that nothing much else changed. We stood there, breathlessly waiting.
Fabritz pointed to the sky. "There's Hubble."
I looked up where he was pointing, and saw a faintly blinking dot moving across the sky. The telescope moved across the horizon, breaking through clouds here and there. I followed its movement until it was within range, then all three of us turned to a single speaker set up in the corner. We held our breaths. Then...
...we are two worlds apart
Can't reach to your heart
When you say that I want it that way
Tell me why, ain't nothin' but a heart ache
Tell me why, ain't nothin' but a mistake
Tell me why
I never wanna hear you say
I want it that way
Am I your fire
Your one desire
Yes I know......
And then it faded out.
"OH MY GOD!" Belle screamed, and the next thing I knew the three of us were leaping and crowing with excitement. The transmission was successful, and Project Whitenoise was broadcasting into deep space.
It would be another three years before any response would come.
Whitenoise by Pengi
